All the 17 toll plazas in Telangana will switch over to the FASTag toll collection mode from Saturday midnight.
Except one lane both ways in each toll plaza, all other lanes would be FASTag lanes only. Any vehicle user entering the FASTag lane will end up paying penalty equivalent of the toll fee, according the Krishna Prasad General Manager Regional Office, Telangana of National Highway Authority of India (NHAI).
It’s almost 42 days since the NHAI as part of the Electronic Toll Collection drive decided to implement FASTag only fee collection at the toll plazas from December 1. But, due to various reasons including technical issues, the date was deferred to December 15.
In order to save fuel, time and pollution and to ensure seamless movement of traffic, Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, Government of India has launched National Electronic Toll Collection program (NETC) which provide for collection of user fee through FASTag based on RFID technology.
“From Sunday morning at 6 am, we will post marshals at all toll gates across Telangana to guide the vehicle users. The FASTag vehicles would be guided to the dedicated lanes while the non-FASTag vehicles will have to enter the only lane that is functional till some time. They will also be impressed upon to buy the tags for hassle-free travel,” Mr. Prasad told The Hindu on Saturday.
Till Friday, as many as 52, 320 tags were issued at the specially arranged counters at the toll plazas on the national highways across the State. Twenty-two commercial and private banks have been authorized to issue the tags to the vehicle users.
The NHAI General Manager said there was encouraging response to the campaign to buy tags as most of the vehicles on the highway, to be precise 50.36 %, were now FASTag enabled. “We are now trying to encourage more people to buy the tags for the ease of travel,” he said adding that there were some teething trouble such as the My FASTag mobile version was only available on android platform and not IoS.
“We did get complaints and also through the 1033 dedicated toll free number that mobile users with IoS platform could not download the app and link their tags to the banks. But, the customers can still link their bank accounts through another android phone using the IHMCL pos app,” he said.
As per the statistics available with the NHAI Telangana, out of the 1.83 lakh transactions done on Friday, 68,713 transactions were through FASTag only. The revenue collected through FASTag, other e-transaction and cash collection stood at ₹2.99 crore till Friday midnight.
